


A flip-flop state of mind

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Feral Chickens, First Kiss, First Time, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff, Food, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Sharing a Bed, because of course there is only one bed, h50 season 9, the entire team plus eddie and the kids make tiny appearances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:43:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23351131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Steve stares at Eddie, who looks back with attentive, unassuming eyes. “Okay, so,” Steve says, transparently stalling for time. “You want me to come with you on a romantic holiday you booked with your girlfriend?”Danny doesn’t say anything to correct Steve in any way, shape or form. “It’ll be fun,” he offers up.Or: Steve goes with Danny to Kauai, where they encounter sun, sea, relaxation, feral chickens, a James Bond marathon and the huge, nine-year-old elephant in the room.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 147
Kudos: 369





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know how according to canon (9.25), Danny went on a trip to Kauai with Rachel, and it was such riotously exuberant adjectives as “nice” and “fun”? I wanted a fic that headed that off at the pass, saving both Danny and Rachel (and by extension Steve and many others). That’s this fic! It’s essentially a canon divergence set between 9.24 and 9.25, but you don’t have to be intimately familiar with what happened in season 9 for this to be readable. It’s 2% plot, 8% gratuitous references to canon and 90% fluff, and it’s rated M for some Mild Mature Material of the sexual variety near the end.
> 
> This is also my first multi-chaptered fic on ao3, so please bear with me (🐻) while I figure this out, eep. There will be six chapters of hopefully ~3k (wordcount may shift a little as things unfold), as well as a prologue (this chapter) and an epilogue, which makes a total of eight chapters in ao3’s count. I’m optimistically hoping to post once every two days, but I’m already foreseeing a few obstacles there, so my current hard goal is to at least have this finished before April is over. We’ll see how it goes!
> 
> The title is an “inspirational holiday quote” (which I find interesting – do people need to be inspired to go on holiday? is this travel agency propaganda?) that’s floating around the internet in many subtly divergent forms and can be bought printed on everything from a poster to a mug to your mom’s dog. The first version I found read in full: “Relax. Unwind. Get in a flip-flop state of mind.” (Bonus fact: while I was researching if I should put a hyphen between flip and flop, I discovered Wikipedia will also offer to redirect you to, among others, Flip-flop (electronics), Flip-flop (politics) and Flip-flop (sex). Take your pick of your favorite definition of the word.)

Danny calls just as Steve is taking his evening meal. Junior is out with Tani somewhere, so dinner, for Steve, means standing at the kitchen counter eating bread with hummus and spooning some beans straight out of a tin can while he’s half chopping, half eating unseasoned free range chicken. He sneaks Eddie a bite once in a while, because Ed’s sitting at his feet so politely that it’s hard not to.

He wipes his hands on a towel before he accepts the call. It’s a Thursday, and it’s only been an hour since Danny dropped him off, but Steve has an inkling of what Danny might want to talk about. “Yeah,” he says, leaning back against the kitchen counter. Eddie looks up at him so imploringly that he uses his free hand to nudge one last piece of chicken to the floor, where it gets snatched up immediately. 

Danny doesn’t bother with greetings, but then they never do. They’ve been each other’s _it’s me_ person right from the start. “Remember how I said I was going to Jersey?”

“Of course,” Steve says, again, and hey, bingo. He got the reason for Danny’s call in one. “You leave tomorrow.”

Danny hums a little. It’s the unhappy kind of hum.

“What?”

“I _may_ -” Danny stretches the may, which is just evidence that whatever he’s about to say is a lot more true than he’s trying to present it. “-have told you an untruth. I’m actually headed to Kauai.”

This is not much of a surprise, either. Steve had kind of hoped it wouldn’t come to this — hoped his gut was wrong, just this once — but he knew, deeper down, that it was inevitable. “With Rachel,” he surmises, just to get it all out there. Something about it hurts. Maybe the Rachel part, because he has a notion that can’t end well, or maybe the part where it means Danny lied straight to his face about it all. He supposes he should be glad Danny is telling him about it now, but he doesn’t think that’s what he’s feeling.

“Yes,” Danny confirms, and Steve has a second to try to grapple with the nauseating wave of emotions that evokes — disappointment, hurt, fear, an unfair but sharp kind of jealousy — before Danny adds, “But no. That was the plan, but it’s not anymore, so hey, how do you feel about an all-expenses-paid trip to what I’m told is Hawaii’s wettest island?”

Steve stares at Eddie, who looks back with attentive, unassuming eyes. “Okay, so,” Steve says, transparently stalling for time. “You want me to come with you on a romantic holiday you booked with your girlfriend?”

Danny doesn’t say anything to correct Steve in any way, shape or form. “It’ll be fun,” he offers up.

“Fun?” Steve’s brain is ticking through this slowly. The offer is real. Rachel is also really Danny’s girlfriend, or more probably she _was_ , past tense, going by this sudden spare plane ticket. 

“Alright,” Danny huffs, offended out of nowhere, “if you’re not interested in free gifts from your BFF with no strings attached, I’ll tell Grover to start packing.”

Steve doubts Danny would. He doesn’t know how he’s so sure of that, but he is. “No, I’m in,” he hears himself say.

“You are?” 

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Danny says, and he sounds sardonic, but it’s the note of exhaustion under it that almost convinces Steve to feel guilty. “I can already tell this is going to be fun. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at nine – be ready, and please don’t forget to pack a good mood, or I might throw you off the plane. I’ll forward you the email with the details.”

“I can drive us to the airport,” Steve says. A peace offering.

Danny takes it exactly as intended. “Like hell you will,” he replies, almost cheerfully grumpy, and hangs up.

It’s a little awkward having to call Lou after that and telling him he’s unexpectedly taking tomorrow and half of next week off, and yes, those are the exact same days as Danny’s leave, and no, that’s right, that’s not a total coincidence. Lou sounds extremely confused towards the end, but there’s definitely a hint of hilarity when he wishes them a fun trip. Steve thanks him and hangs up and feeds Eddie some more chicken, because at least that’s uncomplicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! If you liked this so far, consider leaving a comment while keeping a respectful 1.5m distance from your Wi-Fi router. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


	2. Day 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This looks nice,” Steve says, impressed and wary because of it. 
> 
> Danny is definitely gloating. “Thanks,” he says, and hops up the three steps to the front door, which he opens with a key he mysteriously already has in his pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little over three months ago I said that I was hoping to post a chapter for this fic every two days, and then I blinked and now it’s, you know, three months later. Me from the past was an adorably optimistic comedian, truly.
> 
> But hi! I have not forgotten about this fic, I promise! New goal: no hard goals, except to get this finished at all. I do expect subsequent chapters to come slightly faster, because the good news is that I have been working on this a lot. More good news for me is that I’ve already (re)learned things about myself as a writer in the process, and more good news for you is that a part of why there was such an extended hiatus is that the 3k chapter estimate got left behind in the dust for a 5k+ first chapter instead, which ultimately just means more fic in total!

Their plane is a 717, which is the same model as when they went on their Governor-mandated weekend of couples counseling. The difference is that they’re on the other side of the aisle this time, where the seats are in pairs of two instead of three, and Rachel probably wouldn’t have appreciated Danny parking her at a distance from him – though Steve, admittedly, amuses himself with this thought for a bit – so there’s no pretty blonde stranger sitting between them as an unfortunate, unwilling buffer. If Danny wants to get up to use the bathroom, the only person he’ll have to give a lap dance is Steve.

This probably shouldn’t fill Steve with a sense of grim satisfaction, but he’s long since accepted that some of his responses to Danny are not what they should be.

He holds off on asking any questions until the seatbelt sign blinks out, but then he stretches his legs as best he can (not very good) and digs in. “So should I assume you got the holiday in the divorce?”

Danny frowns and tucks the laminated safety instructions back in the little net on the back of the seat of the person in front of him. Steve takes notice, but doesn’t say anything. Danny’s always felt less comfortable in the air than Steve, but this is a habit he didn’t pick up until he had to crash-land a failing aircraft on the beach because the only thing leaking more than the plane’s tank was Steve’s gut, so it’s one item on a short list of things that are totally out of bounds for teasing. 

Danny folds his hands over his stomach, sighing. “Yeah. No custody battles for once.”

“Hey, imagine that.”

Danny side-eyes him. “You’re an asshole, you know that?”

Steve does. It’s one of the reasons they get along so well, so he just pretends to roll his eyes at Danny. “Did you ask me to come with you so you could insult me the whole time?”

“It’s definitely one of the perks,” Danny grumbles, but then he extracts a pair of earbuds from the small bag he brought in addition to his travel backpack (“Is that a handbag?” “ _No_ , you Neanderthal, it’s a messenger bag. A small one.”) and offers one of them to Steve. “Want to watch a movie together?”

The flight should take less than an hour, but Steve accepts the offered earbud. He feels weirdly touched, even though this was probably just more preparation to get close to Rachel that Steve happens to benefit from now. “As long as it’s not-”

“They don’t _have_ Pitch Perfect 2. I already checked.” Danny jams the plug into the right hole and there’s a click in Steve’s ear as the audio connects.

Steve grins and graciously allows Danny to pick the movie, with the caveat that there is no singing involved. This is another reason they get along: they’re assholes, but they’re assholes who pay attention, sometimes. 

*

They take a cab from the airport, because Danny hadn’t planned on renting a car because he didn’t intend on driving all around the island. It’s a further reminder of whose place Steve is taking and why it’s a little awkward even if they valiantly pretend it isn’t. Now that Steve’s here instead of Rachel, chances are a lot slimmer that Danny’s going to spend the majority of his holiday indoors having sex, which no doubt featured in his original plan.

During the drive from the airport, Danny isn’t thinking about that and mourning the loss, or if he is, he hides it well. He seems pretty content to look out the window at the scenery that passes them by, which so far consists mostly of palm trees and flat green fields. He also, it seems, has already done his homework. “Did you know some of the shooting for Jurassic Park and one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies was done here? Not _here_ here, of course, but on this island.”

Steve looks out his own window. It’s sunny. There’s more bright blue sky than you can shake a stick at. This is definitely still Hawaii. “Lilo and Stitch live here, too.”

“They’re cartoons.” Danny seems to weigh his own comeback and then turns away from his window and to Steve and adds, suspiciously, “When did you watch Lilo and Stitch?”

“It’s a good movie.”

Danny makes an amused noise. “For Charlie, yes.”

There is no way Steve will tell Danny that he thought the same thing, or that he in fact watched it because he missed Charlie after three weeks of random circumstance keeping him and the little guy apart. Better yet, hell will need to freeze over before he would ever think about admitting that he’s kind of glad he decided to give the movie a try on his own one lonely night, out of curiosity, because he ended up crying by the end of it when Stitch was being separated from his family and said it was little and broken but still good. Nobody ever needs to hear about that. It was bad enough when Junior came home and Steve wasn’t sure if his eyes were red.

“There’s nothing wrong with cartoons,” he says instead. “They’re family movies, Danny. Meant for all ages.”

Danny scoffs. “Yeah, that’s what they say, but wait until you’ve had to sit through Snow White three times in a row. Then you’ll feel differently.”

“I don’t have any feelings about Disney movies whatsoever.” That not only is a lie, but it also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s okay. Sometimes it’s not about making sense. It’s about watching Danny be annoyed about said lack of sense.

“Sure you do,” Danny says, predictably heated for no good reason. Their arguments follow a pattern: say something stupid, get something stupid in return. “Are you human? Then you have feelings about Disney movies. It’s a fact of life. They’re designed to get to you by evil social scientists in Disney’s basement.”

Steve watches Danny for long enough that Danny takes notice and looks back, ready to be offended purely for this. “I bet you actually still love Snow White,” Steve tells him. “I bet you watch it with the kids and have sing alongs.”

“Yes, we do,” Danny says, and just like that, he relaxes a little. Thinking about his kids tends to make him feel happy feelings.

Steve is not immune to any of that. “Okay, that’s actually really cute.”

Danny reaches across the empty middle seat to hit him in the shoulder. There’s some triumph there. “See? Right now, you’re having feelings about me and my kids watching Disney movies. That counts. You’re human.”

“Aw, Danno,” Steve says, sticking with the cute angle, “that’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me all day.”

“Hey, I’m taking you on a romantic holiday, aren’t I? I’m the pinnacle of sweetness. You don’t get to complain.” 

Steve grins and is about to respond, but then he accidentally catches the cab driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. The guy looks away quickly, but Steve knows that look after nine years. It’s one of those that’s not quite judgmental, but definitely confused and if he had to put words to it, it would be oh-shit-they’re-gay. 

The rest of the drive is mostly silent.

*

Steve did of course read the address Danny sent him, but he didn’t look it up before they left. He blindly assumed it would belong to a hotel, which, as it turns out, it does not. The cab drops them off at the end of a fairly long gravel driveway lined by woods, which completely hides the house from view until they’re standing in front of it – and it _is_ a house, not a hotel or even a little log cabin.

“This looks nice,” Steve says, impressed and wary because of it. Who lives here? How many strangers are they going to be sharing this place with? Did Danny Airbnb some bored rich people’s couch?

Danny is definitely gloating. “Thanks,” he says, and hops up the three steps to the front door, which he opens with a key he mysteriously already has in his pocket. He disappears inside with one last look back that gives the impression he’s checking to see if Steve’s jaw has hit the floor yet rather than if Steve is coming along.

Steve, driven by sheer curiosity, follows him in anyway.

The inside of the house is even more impressive, albeit also confusing and worrying. There is no hall, so he’s immediately thrown into the living area, which is a large, open, almost painfully modern and well-decorated space. High ceilings, lots of natural light, dark stone floors and a white rug with a black couch and lots of chrome and glass – it looks like a magazine spread, not a place people are supposed to exist in. Steve wanders through it like in a dream and ends up at the windows in the back that eat up almost an entire wall. At first it’s because he can see the ocean and he’s naturally drawn to water, but as he gets closer he also gains a good view of what’s immediately behind the house, between him and the soothing endless blue. 

“There’s a pool,” he says, because there is: a huge rectangle of obscenely pretty cyan right there, three steps down from the lanai. It’s a far cry from being big enough to conform to Olympic regulations, but it’s definitely no kiddie pool either. 

Danny pops up next to him, figures out the right way to turn the door handle, and pushes a very smooth sliding door open. The air that greets them is warmer than inside the house, but not uncomfortably so. “Pretty sweet, right?”

Danny appears to have dumped his luggage somewhere, so Steve drops his bag by the nearest couch too and trails after him when he steps outside. There’s a wide lanai with an overhang for shade, a terrace with the pool in the middle and beyond that an artificially perfect white strip of beach with some actual palm trees speckled over it. It reminds Steve of his own backyard, but dressed up in a way fit for people who care about Rolexes and Louis Vuitton handbags. There’s less shade, more sun, and everything sparkles at least a little, even the tile. 

He has to ask, though. “Why is there a private pool? The ocean’s right there.”

“Some people might like to not get eaten by sharks on their holiday, Steve.”

Steve tears his eyes from the scenery to look at Danny, who glances at him and away, and Steve is utterly confounded. “Did you mortgage your house? How are you paying for all of this?”

“That implies I’m not still paying off loans for buying my house in the first place. Check your privilege, buddy.” Danny pauses there, like that might be all the answer he’s willing to give, but Steve’s silence must be loud enough. Eventually, Danny continues. “Okay, so remember the guy who tried to kill me for getting his wife out of their abusive relationship back in Jersey?”

It’s still a touch warmer than it has to be, but Steve represses a shudder. Memories of a sterile quarantine room and being shut off from the help they need while Danny is bleeding out and barely breathing are not hard to call to the forefront. They’re much harder to push back down. “And I stuck my finger in your chest and saved you,” he says, because that’s the punchline. It’s the only nearly funny part when told the right way, so it’s the only part he can casually talk about in all of this. “Yes, I remember.”

“Right.” Danny takes two steps forward and drums his fingers on the lanai railing. “Well, his wife came to visit me last year, remember that too? Brooke. We’ve kept in contact since.”

The bad feelings stirred up by the memories double. Steve watches the back of Danny’s head closely. “Is that why you and Rachel broke up?”

Danny’s head whips around. “What? No, idiot, that was the lead-up to me admitting I didn’t actually pay a cent for any of this.” He half turns to face Steve and leans against the railing fully, settling in to tell a story. “Brooke found a new guy, a nice one, some millionaire philanthropist who now spends his days cutting ribbons at orphanages or something, because she met him while volunteering at a soup kitchen, can you believe that? Apparently sometimes karma does reward good people who had it rough by dropping literal fairytale princes in their lap. So they’re getting married in the spring and Brooke offered me their summerhouse any time I wanted because she still feels guilty that her ex nearly shot me dead.” Danny waves his hand around like the rest of the story is obvious. “Then when Rachel and I decided we wanted to get away for a little bit, I cashed in on that favor and by the time things fell apart it was too late to cancel, so now, well, you know this part.”

Steve’s sinister feelings do an abrupt 180 and end up as sunny as the surface of the pool. He grins. “Now you’re taking me on this free holiday, you cheapskate. And here I thought you’d sold a kidney or something. I was this close to feeling guilty.”

Danny waves Steve’s hand showing just how close out of the air. “Nah, the only thing I paid for is the flights. I’m saving all my organs for the next time your stupid ass needs them.” He turns back to the ocean, like he feels too that this is a little too much talk about looming death, even as lighthearted as it is. Half a second later he’s already looking back. “Besides, don’t even try to pretend you don’t love this. I know you, okay? Just the idea of free stuff gets you all hot and bothered.”

Steve takes those last few steps too and leans on the railing next to Danny. “I’m not even going to fight you on that,” he says, magnanimously. Their elbows knock. “And you know what? I bet I’m enjoying this more than Rachel would’ve.”

Danny gives him a push with his shoulder, as if in retaliation, but then he says, “Yeah, actually, you’re probably right. Rachel would have thought it was more meaningful if I actually _had_ wrecked my bank account to fly her out here.”

“See? It all works out.” Steve makes a deliberately obnoxious gesture out at the ocean, like he’s pointing at it as the source of all their luck. “The universe finds a way.”

“I hate you,” Danny says drily, but when Steve grins at him, he grins back.

*

They head back inside to explore the rest of the house, which is just as tastefully over the top as the outside. There’s the spacious living area with a giant flatscreen and the biggest, softest couch Steve has ever had the good fortune of putting his ass on, a slightly raised open kitchen complete with wet bar and a central kitchen island with some stools that are no doubt designer, a dining room in a corner of the building with huge windows on two sides overlooking the beach and the ocean in ways worthy of gracing a postcard, a study with a reading nook and more books than Steve owns in his full-time house, a well-equipped private indoor gym that gets him pretty jealous, a very modern bathroom with a rain shower and a sunken tub big enough to fit at least three people, and, of course, a giant bedroom. Singular.

“One bed,” Steve summarizes. Also singular.

“Yep,” Danny says, and that’s all they say about it.

It’s still afternoon, so they figure out exactly how far they are from civilization, and when the answer turns out to be surprisingly not far at all, they decide to locate the nearest store that sells food and walk there to stock up on some supplies. Their shopping list goes beer, food, snacks, and more beer, and Steve mocks Danny all the way to the store for having written that down on an actual piece of paper. In turn, Danny mocks Steve all the way back because he managed to almost forget the beer.

They’re turning onto the ridiculous private driveway again, making the switch from walking alongside the road to comfortably taking the middle, when Danny gets so distracted he cuts himself off in the middle of yet another sentence meant to rib Steve for his terrible shopping strategy. “Seriously, what’s with all the chickens? Oahu isn’t overrun like this.”

Steve hadn’t paid them much mind so far, but Danny is right that in their few hours on Kauai they’ve already seen more fowl than they usually do in a week on Oahu. They might not see any at all at home, depending on what neighborhoods the job takes them to. “I read a New York Times article on the genetic history of Kauai’s feral chickens once.”

That distracts Danny from the chickens for a moment. He stares at Steve pointedly enough that Steve finds it necessary to stare back. At least he can do so guiltfree, now that they’re technically on the road but not in a car for once. “You’re way too good at hiding that you’re a total nerd,” Danny says, all dismay but undercut by his apparent amusement. “You may look like a high school cheerleader’s dreamy jock boyfriend, but underneath, you’re the kid that enjoys being called on in math class.”

Danny talks fast, but Steve has very sharp hearing. He grins. “Did you just call me dreamy?” For that, he’ll even let the nerd comment go that’s seemingly based solely on the fact he read one in-depth newspaper article one time.

“To a teen girl,” Danny dismisses. “Tell me more about those chickens.” 

That’s unfair – Steve would like to push the issue, but he also has a weak spot for sharing Hawaii trivia with Danny. Danny knows how to play him.

He takes a bigger step to avoid some fresh chicken shit on the road and chooses the trivia. “The gist of it is that two hurricanes that only swiped the other islands blew open a lot of coops on Kauai and the mongoose was never released here, like it was in the rest of the state. That’s why there’s so many.”

“Mongoose?”

“It eats the eggs.” Right then, as if on cue, a mother hen emerges out of the bright green brush a hundred feet ahead of them, dragging a string of small fluffy chicklets along behind her. They spill out over the sandy road like a crowd of kindergartners being released on a playground. 

“Son of a bitch,” Danny says. “Would you look at that? Uneaten eggs, all over the street.”

Steve is suddenly doubly glad there don’t seem to be a lot of cars around in this area. “Chickens cause a lot of road accidents each year, especially with unsuspecting tourists.”

“With every word you say, I’m more and more glad Rachel forced my family to land in Honolulu, not chicken paradise. Driving with you is dangerous enough as is.”

Steve skips right past Rachel to focus on his own inclusion in that statement. Danny’s forgetting something vital there. “You wouldn’t have met me if you had settled here.”

“Right,” Danny says, dry and yet not insincere. “Can’t have that, of course.”

“No. Who would you yell at?”

Right on cue, Danny yells, “Ho!” Steve holds position and doesn’t jump back, like Danny does, but he can admit to himself that he’s a little startled too by the latest chicken that jumped out of the trees, way closer than the last one and with wings flapping loudly, sailing down to the street from the dirt bank and causing some of its buddies to scatter.

Danny doesn’t try to hide he’s shaken up. He’s frozen where he stands. “It’s _flying_. Why? Chickens don’t _fly_.”

Steve watches Danny’s horrified face in fascination. “Sometimes I forget just how much of a city boy you are.”

Danny rustles his plastic shopping bag in vaguely Steve’s direction without taking his eyes off of the animals. “Okay, I get it, it’s a feral chicken so it flies. Why not? I’ve just never _seen_ \- Jesus Christ, it’s coming this way.” Danny takes two more steps back, but that doesn’t deter the very determined chicken. 

It approaches, and Steve could probably intervene, but he’s having too much fun watching this play out. “It can sense you’re a tourist. It hopes you’re stupid enough to feed it.”

“I’m not. This is my food and I paid for it. Fly off, devil bird.” Danny swings his bag again, but this time roughly in the direction of the chicken. He’s not trying to hit it, but just the gesture seems to register in a bird brain as predatory enough that it makes a sharp U-turn and darts away and tries its luck pecking at the ground instead, keeping the same suspicious eye on Danny that Danny has on it. “That crazy look in its eyes reminds me of a certain British woman I know,” Danny says, ominously.

There’s Rachel again. It’s already taken longer for her to show up in Danny’s words than Steve expected. “Who?” he asks, playing dumb. “The Queen?”

“Sure,” Danny says, but he doesn’t seem to be paying full attention. He’s too busy glaring at the chicken.

“Oh, come on,” Steve says, because this is getting ridiculous. It’s a bird. It didn’t divorce Danny, and it certainly didn’t dump him just before a trip, and even if it had they can still get around it in a big circle. “There are baby chicklets around. She’s a mom and she’s feeling protective. You should know what that’s like.”

Steve leads the way and Danny follows close behind, keeping as much distance between himself and the bird as possible and never letting it out of his sight. “I’m confused. Are you calling me a mom or a chicken?”

Steve gives up and takes the inside of the road, putting himself between Danny and the big scary birds. There’s nothing to say they couldn’t start coming from the other side of the road too, but in the interest of ever getting back to their fancy house he doesn’t point that out. “I’m calling you a good parent. Learn to take a compliment.”

“Learn to give a compliment. Being compared to _that_ does not do it for me, buddy.”

“Oh well, in that case in the future I’ll be sure to run any nice things I’d like to say about you by your guidelines for acceptable compliments first.”

“You do that,” Danny says, and Steve shakes his head in disbelief while Danny keeps craning his to make sure they aren’t followed, and that’s the end of that.

*

The moment Danny enters the kitchen and lays out the ingredients for dinner on the white marble countertop, he starts making slightly obscene noises. 

“What is happening?” Steve asks, unsure if he should laugh or be grossed out. He takes one of the stools that gives him a nice vantage point but where he’s still protected by the kitchen island. Seems like he might need it.

“Nothing that concerns you.” Danny opens and closes cabinets until he finds a pan that meets his exacting standards. “This is between me and the countertop.” He brushes a hand over the white marble while he takes his find to the stove, and Steve is genuinely unsure if Danny is playing it up at this point or if this is all completely genuine creepy appreciation of kitchen stylings.

“That’s exactly what concerns me,” he shoots back. “My food is between you and your new crush.”

“Okay,” Danny says, and plops the block of ground beef into the sizzling hot pan like interpunction, “you know what, actually I will let you join in on this conversation, because you know how I always tell you to finally remodel your ancient kitchen?” 

“And I always wonder why you think you get to decide what I want to do with the house I own? Yeah, I remember.”

Danny turns to look at Steve and point with the spatula he’s been using to break up the beef. “See, that’s where you’re wrong.”

Steve severely doubts that. “It is? Enlighten me, please, wise Obi-Wan.”

“To put it plainly, you like my company and I like solid marble countertops. You do the math.” There’s a little more spatula conducting to underscore the point before Danny pokes it into the beef again.

“Wow,” Steve says, at once appalled and impressed by the subtle elegance of that burn. “Harsh.”

“I’m just saying, it’s a love triangle.”

“Right, and you’re trying to convince me to bring my rival into my own home?”

Danny puts his spatula down like he hadn’t thought of that. “Okay, point for you, you are too smart to fall for that.” Steve waits for the catch while Danny takes his time adding the pre-cut onion and the spice blend packet they bought. (“Not ideal of course,” Danny had told what turned out to be the sole owner of the little shop at the register, to Steve’s mortification, “but needs must.”) “How about this: it could easily net you some pancakes.”

“Ah,” Steve breathes, like he totally gets it now. “So all I have to do is pay out the nose for a renovation I don’t think I need and I’ll get blueberry pancakes every once in a while because you want to hump my kitchen cabinets? Suddenly this sounds like a great deal.”

Danny cracks open a can of basil tomato sauce. “I knew I’d get you on board eventually. Now hush, I need to concentrate.”

“On layering pasta?” Steve asks, because Danny’s not at that step yet, but Steve is pretty sure by now that the mystery dish Danny told him to guess and then refused to confirm is lasagna. 

Danny doesn’t even congratulate him on his insight. “It’s an art, Steve. It’s an art.”

Steve finds himself surprisingly content to just watch Danny perform his art with excessive perfectionism. He knows it’s at least partially an act, because he’s caught moments of Danny making this exact dish in the past and Danny has never arranged the grated cheese to lie the way he wants it to by hand before, but knowing Danny is putting on a ridiculous show for his benefit is in no way a bad thing. He wonders if this would have happened if Rachel had been sitting in his spot, but his mind keeps wandering to all the ways Danny could try to romance someone in this kitchen (someone sitting on the countertop and wrapping their legs around their partner, hugs from behind while the other person’s at the stove, bending over the kitchen island to steal a kiss), so he stops wondering.

*

It is lasagna. Steve was right. Ha.

It’s good lasagna though, so he keeps the gloating to a minimum, because he doesn’t want to antagonize Danny too much over this. Another reason that would be inadvisable is because he’s been waiting for dinner all day so he could broach a certain topic. It wasn’t procrastination, but a strategic decision: Danny has hot food in him now, which usually does some good for the volatility of his mood. “I have a question,” Steve tells him, once Danny is two-thirds through his first helping, “and you’re not going to enjoy it.”

Danny glances up from his plate. He looks unimpressed. “Is this you pretending to ask permission? You’re going to throw that question at me anyway, so just go.”

Steve goes. “How long have you known Rachel wouldn’t be coming?”

That makes Danny sigh, but at least he’s not yelling yet. He spears up a tiny piece of cooked beef and then sits back in his chair, just holding the fork. “Officially since Monday, but things have been on the rocks again for a while. It wasn’t a surprise.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

The way Danny waves his fork is dangerous. Not because of the silverware itself, but because of the very real possibility that what’s on the end of it will go flying and leave amazing red stains wherever it lands. It’s a nice dining room, but it has a lot of very light colors in it. “Do _you_ want to talk about heartbreak while we’re on holiday in paradise?”

“Heartbreak, huh?” Steve’s sufficiently distracted from the risks posed by tomato sauce very abruptly. That’s a big word to throw around. If limited to romantic connections, he’s only really known it once – when Cath left that last time, when there was a ring burning a hole in his pocket and he had to tell her he couldn’t wait for her anymore – and he knows Danny’s been around the block a few times more than that, but still.

“We were married once and we have two kids, of course there were going to be feelings involved,” Danny says, and his patience is audibly wearing thin now. “How are we still talking about this? I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Alright.” Steve’s secret is that he doesn’t really want to talk about it, either. He just feels like he should for Danny’s sake, and he might have a masochistic streak deep down, who knows. “You’re okay though, right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” Danny looks at him, and then puts down the fork and sighs and keeps looking at him, and the previous bite in his voice is nowhere to be found when he adds, more soberly, “Shockingly okay, really.”

Steve nods at him. “Good. That’s all I need.”

Danny rolls his eyes, which reassures Steve further.

*

They clean the kitchen, load the dishwasher, wash the nonstick pan by hand anyway because Danny insists it would be a crime to put something that beautiful in a machine, and then move outside to have a few beers by the pool. It’s long dark by the time they gather the empty bottles and go back in.

Steve does a last round of the house, just because he likes to know all the locks that should be turned actually are turned, and then he follows Danny into the bedroom.

He finds Danny standing next to the bed. He’s on one side, so Steve moves to the other, and their eyes meet across the expanse of the California King sized mattress. Danny looks ready for battle. “Don’t offer to sleep on the couch.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Steve says, because he wasn’t. The thought may have crossed his mind, but he’s neither selfless nor smart enough to give up the chance to spend the night on this soft mattress in this beautiful room just to avoid a potentially awkward situation if one of them turns out to be the cuddly type in their sleep.

Danny nods sharply, like he still expects Steve to kick up a fuss over something. “Good. Me either.”

“If you tried to sleep out there, I’d drag you back in here.” Danny’s look shifts from belligerent to incredulously alarmed, so Steve adds, “Sleeping on a couch would be hell on your knee and your back, which means you’d be hell on me tomorrow. I intend to have fun.”

“Thank you,” Danny says. “I think.”

“You’re welcome.” Their conversation seems to have come to an end, because Steve doesn’t know what else would need to be said and Danny isn’t talking, just looking at him from the other side of the bed. Steve gets the feeling that this is growing uncomfortable, so he grabs the neck of his shirt and strips it off. He gets it past his face just in time to see Danny turn away.

They go through their evening routines. They each get in on one side of the bed, lie down and turn out the lights. It’s quiet. “Hey Steve,” Danny’s voice says, in the darkness. 

Steve has never had much trouble falling asleep, and even if he had, he’d have gotten over it very quickly in the Navy. He was just on the cusp of drifting off, so hearing Danny, tone intimate and from right beside him in bed, is-

It’s something he’s too tired to dwell on, he tells himself. He’s not avoiding anything, just filing it away for later. Or never. “Yeah?”

There’s a breath of quiet, like maybe now Danny’s too close to falling asleep, but then he just says, “Goodnight.”

Steve grunts in agreement without opening his eyes. “Night.”

He still falls asleep quickly, because there’s no nagging worry in the back of his skull because it’s not weird. It’s not. There’s nothing weird going on at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you're all doing well, comments are very cool, and have a nice day, you. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


	3. Day 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny comes up near the middle of the pool, pushes the water out of his face, and squints at Steve. “Are you just going to sit there?”
> 
> “Just waiting to see whether I’d need to rescue you,” Steve throws back, and then he gets up and dives in and makes it all the way to the other side without coming up for air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Throwing myself into this multichapter endeavor is boldly exposing me as the slow and easily distracted writer I secretly am, but rest assured that I will see this through, even if I do it with all the speed of a snail with two broken legs. 🐌
> 
> No chickens were harmed in the writing of this chapter! Some Steves might have been, but I promise they’ll be fine.

Steve gets up at eight – it’s a holiday, so he can allow himself to sleep in – and goes for a run on the treadmill in the workout room. It’s nearing nine when Danny wanders in, still dressed in only his boxers and his sleep shirt, hair soft and touchable and a little wild, blinking like he’s not sure he’s not sleepwalking. He comes to a stop two paces inside the room, watches Steve pant for a moment, makes a noise of disgust and turns back around. 

“Good morning to you too,” Steve tells him, obnoxiously cheerful on purpose.

“I’m making us pancakes,” Danny yells back, without so much as another glance over his shoulder. 

Steve keeps running for another minute so Danny won’t have _all_ the ammunition if it comes down to another round of their recurring does-Steve-have-a-pancake-fetish debate. Then he gives in to his stomach, Danny, and the mysterious lure of the pancake, and hops off the treadmill to start in on his cooling down stretches.

*

Steve wants to spend their first full day on Kauai on a hike, because this is an island that’s known for its natural beauty and it would be a shame to miss out on that. Danny wants to spend their first day by the private pool, because he says it would be a shame to miss out on _that_. They compromise by deciding they’ll go on a (short! Danny insists) hike in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day lazing around wherever Danny wants, once the sun is at its peak and the risk of sunburn the greatest. This last is something Steve adds in a last ditch attempt to seduce Danny into going with his full day hike plan, but Danny just levels a look at him and will not be swayed.

“You ever been here before?” Danny asks, forty-five minutes into the outing Steve chose. They had to follow the road for a while, but they’ve hit an actual trail now, and they’ve left signs of civilization well behind.

Steve, who is walking in front and carrying a backpack with water bottles and granola power bars Danny almost refused to buy yesterday, throws a brief look over his shoulder. Danny seems okay so far; the path is pretty easy for now, being just narrow enough that they’re not walking side by side anymore like they were at the very beginning, but still composed of flat dirt and not too steep. The trees provide a nice shade, so the temperature is perfect, too. “Here here?” he asks.

Danny makes the appropriate annoyed noise. “Not _here_ here, _on the island_ here.”

“Sure. I came here for that case with-”

“For fun,” Danny interrupts, sternly enough that it doesn’t sound like much fun. “Not for Five-0. You need to have a life outside of work, Steve.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you’re a human being. Much as you might like to deny it, you have needs too.”

That sounds suspiciously like Danny’s about to call him a monk again. Steve gets his eyes ready to roll. “What are we talking about here?”

“Hopes, dreams, wants. Hobbies beyond shopping for guns and not using that guitar I gave you.”

“Hey, I’ve used it.”

“Yeah?” And God, Danny actually sounds a little hopeful.

“Yes,” Steve reiterates, and skips right past feeling guilty over the fact that he can’t really remember the last time. It was probably over a year ago. Junior is a great housemate, but his presence or even just the looming threat that he could come home at any time don’t exactly invite Steve to sit down in the living room and be pretty bad at something that makes him feel too emotionally raw to be able to take any criticism, however well-intended.

Of course Danny doesn’t get the memo that Steve would really like a subject change right about now. It’s questionable whether he’d read it, anyway. “What did you play?”

“Music.”

“Right, but what kind of music?”

While Danny pressures him, the forest decides to be kind. He spots a root of a large tree right next to the path, thick enough and set apart from the ground just far enough that it forms a sort of natural bench. It’s so clean on top that it’s definitely been used as such by hikers who came before them. “I think it’s time for a break.” He shoulders off the backpack to make his point.

Danny throws his hands halfway up. “A break? After less than an hour?” He readily sits down and accepts the water bottle Steve is pushing at him, but that doesn’t stop his bitching about it. “Are you feeling alright? Did the chickens eat your brain? Because that’s the kind of thing I’d like to be told.”

“So you can run away again?”

“I was actually thinking of avenging you, if you must know, but if you’re going to be like that, then never mind.” Danny puts his mouth to the bottle and tilts his head back, which blessedly means he’s forced to stop talking for just a moment. 

Steve looks at the energy bar wrapper he’s tearing into. Much safer than anything else he’s tempted to watch. “I think I’d put my money on the chicken,” he says.

That makes Danny literally sputter in indignation, which is very satisfying.

*

Guitars end up forgotten in the background, whether it’s because Danny takes pity on him and drops it in an uncommon act of silent kindness or whether he just successfully tricked Danny into forgetting. That doesn’t mean Danny can’t find something else to harp on, of course. “That backpack,” he says, in a curious tone, from behind Steve again once they’ve continued on their trek through the green.

“Yes?” Steve asks, because that wasn’t even a sentence yet.

“Where did you get it? You didn’t have it with you on the plane.”

He shrugs his shoulders to make the topic of conversation bounce a bit. “I did. It was in my backpack.”

“It _is_ a backpack.”

“Yes,” Steve agrees, in pretty much the same tone as before. This might have been a sentence, but it wasn’t a question, and Danny still seems to expect an answer.

Danny clarifies, as he’s wont to do, with an indignant query. “You packed a bag inside a different bag?”

“It’s the easiest way to carry it if it’s empty.” He tugs on one of the straps. All this talking about the backpack makes him very aware of how it’s causing his shirt to stick to his back, but he’s had worse. Obviously he has. “Besides, you’d be surprised how much room there is in a guy’s luggage if he doesn’t insist on carrying around ten different hair products.”

Steve knows deep in his soul that Danny is shaking a finger at his back right now. “No, don’t turn this around on me. Did you really just try to say that the easiest way to carry a backpack is inside of another backpack? And you’re supposed to be a tactical smart guy?”

Steve looks over his shoulder to see Danny’s finger for himself, which turns out to be a mistake, because that’s when a lot of things happen at once: there’s a sudden noise of something small crashing through the underbrush of the forest very close by, Danny’s eyes go wide, and there’s a hellish screeching sound that makes Steve try to face the front again to see what the hell is happening, but nobody could have been quick enough. He stumbles over something, crashes to the floor, has to catch himself hard on his hands to avoid smacking face-first into forest dirt, and just spots a brownish and bird-sized flash disappearing further down the slope on the other side of the path, mostly out of the corner of his eye.

It’s still enough to know what it was.

“Chicken,” Danny says, with a strange kind of worried respect and like he’s entirely unsure whether to laugh or curse. “And I don’t even mean you.” 

Steve scowls, but Danny, still standing up, offers him a hand and he takes it. The moment he’s back on his feet he knows something isn’t quite right.

“You okay?” Danny asks, who’s far too observant.

“I’m fine.” Steve busies himself brushing off his knees and hands. He carefully circles his right ankle and has to suppress a wince.

Danny gives him a sharp look and is on his knees before Steve can even open his mouth to repeat that he’s just dandy. “Hurts?”

“Barely.” Steve allows Danny to peel his sock down until it meets his hiking shoe and to poke at his ankle a little, but only because Danny would be impossible if he didn’t. It chafes, though – not Danny’s fingers, which are warm but careful, but having to be the patient after an accident this stupid. Maybe he left his brain back on Oahu.

“You probably twisted it,” Danny opines, sitting back on his heels and looking up at Steve. The position suddenly seems unbearably awkward, so Steve takes a step back, which at least distracts him because shit, yes. That’s definitely twisted.

But he’s had worse here, too. Just gotta walk it off. 

He knows that’s not how it works, but he also can’t bear to let Danny play doctor for any longer. “What are you sitting there for? We have another half an hour to go, and then we’re home and you can take all the breaks you want.”

Danny rises, but not to the bait. “Right, but can you walk that far with a bum ankle?”

“Yeah.” Steve makes a point of distributing his weight evenly and not favoring either foot when he mockingly demonstrates marching in place. The pain is not pleasant, but it’s not terrible. He’s not going to fall over again unless he fails to notice another feathery ambush. “See? I’m fine, Danno, let’s go.”

Danny, being waved on, gives him a last suspicious look. “If you say so,” he says, and goes, taking the lead this time.

Which is good, because it means he can’t watch Steve grit his teeth and try to figure out how to put his foot down to make it hurt the least. The unfortunate conclusion, after fifteen minutes of quiet experimentation, is that it’s all pretty much the same, and it’s all getting worse.

Fifteen minutes is also around the time they descend a last slope and are abruptly spit out by the woods, emerging onto a paved road. All they have to do to get back to the house is follow it, but in the moment Steve takes to look both ways for cars and a sense of direction, Danny looks back and stops dead. “You’re still limping,” he says. It’s an accusation, but one that has a conviction tacked on before Steve has even had a chance to mount a defense.

“I’m not,” Steve insists anyway, but he doesn’t keep walking to prove his point, because he knows it would do the opposite.

Danny fully ignores that. He starts waving hands in inward motions, like he wants Steve to come closer, but he’s the one moving in. “Let me help you back to the house. You’re going to make it worse and I have no desire to become the leading expert on hospital waiting rooms in Hawaii just because you’re too stubborn to be alive.”

That just makes zero sense. “I’m alive _because_ I’m stubborn.” There’ve been more than enough incidents that prove as much.

Regrettably, he can also think of one or two that prove he’s alive because Danny happens to be equally donkey-headed. “That may be,” Danny says, mulishly, “but you’re not alone in hostile territory in Timbuktu right now. I’m here. Give me the bag.”

Reluctantly, Steve hands it over. As little as he likes the situation, denying plain fact is the kind of thing he can’t do, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the only intelligent way to get back to the house is to swallow his pride, attempt not to choke on it, and accept Danny’s help.

Danny shrugs on the backpack and pushes in close to get a grip on Steve’s waist. He lets Steve put an arm over his shoulders. “This is what you get for going on a run and then deciding you need to force me on a hike.”

“This has nothing to do with my exercise schedule. It was the chicken.” Their first steps are slow and careful, finding a balance.

“Right, one of those road accidents that all the tourists get involved in. Use your right leg less, numbnut, that’s the whole point of this.” Danny grips Steve’s side tighter and Steve gives in to the inevitable and starts doing more of a hop than a walk. It does feel a lot better, if also vaguely ridiculous. “Think it might come back to sue you for animal abuse?”

Steve huffs, but then sighs and admits to himself that he’s just curious enough what the hell that’s supposed to mean to use actual words in response. “Animal abuse?”

“You kicked it.” Danny seems to be taking perverse pleasure from this. Sometimes, Steve would really like to strangle him. Just a little.

“I didn’t kick it. It tripped me.”

“I’ll grant you that it definitely won the fight. It was still walking and clearly you aren’t.”

On second thought, maybe _sometimes_ is lowballing it a little. “I can walk just fine.”

“I’m sure you can, but can and should are two very different things.”

“What about want to?”

Danny rolls his eyes, which Steve can feel under his arm, because the way Danny does facial expressions involves his whole body. “What do you think of don’t have to, won’t be allowed to, and aren’t going to, if you have a single braincell left knocking around in there?”

It’s infuriating, but Danny is undeniably right. He _can_ walk, but if he does it like he normally would and keeps that up all the way back, he’s not only going to be in more pain now with every step he takes but will also royally fuck up something that would probably be fine pretty soon if he just gave it some rest. He already tested that theory for a little longer than he should have, probably.

He hates this. It goes against every instinct he has, both those he was born with and the ones the Navy drilled into him. “I don’t like being injured,” is how it comes out, which, he’ll admit, is just a smidgen pathetic.

“Most people would agree with you there,” Danny says.

They fall into quietude, which gives Steve time to mope and Danny time to grow tired of having to carry half an adult man. They make it all the way to the private road leading up to the house like that, with Steve feeling increasingly guilty and awkward about that guilt, before he can’t keep his mouth shut anymore and says the first thing that comes to mind just to break the silence. “I’m a lot heavier than Rachel.”

Danny grunts, which Steve at first takes as agreement, but it doesn’t seem to be one, considering Danny follows it up with, “Rachel? Where’s she coming from?”

“Pretty sure she was already here in spirit.”

They almost stumble over nothing and the way Danny pulls at Steve to get his grip back and avoid losing his balance is unexpectedly rough. Steve’s about to complain and tell him to take it easy, when Danny continues, voice suddenly tight and body language prickly enough to rival a cactus. “Is this something you’ve been doing the whole time since I asked you to come? Comparing yourself to Rachel?”

Well, that’s rich. “You haven’t?”

“No!” Danny bellows, just furious enough that Steve, to his own surprise, actually believes that’s true. “What kind of question even is that? You’re not Rachel. You’re nothing _like_ Rachel, and that’s a good thing.”

“You wanted to bring her,” Steve points out, because he wasn’t born yesterday and he knows he’s right.

Danny isn’t having it. “Okay! Shut up. Just, shut your mouth, because clearly nothing useful is coming out of it.”

Steve does, but he also grinds his teeth. He can feel how tense Danny is next to him.

Things continue like that for a decent portion of the driveway, until Danny makes an angry noise, almost a growl, and breaks. “Look, you’re not the consolation prize, okay? You’re an idiot if you think that. You really need me to tell you I’m _glad_ you’re here instead of Rachel?”

“Yes,” Steve snaps back. “Yes, maybe I do.”

“Well, I am. I’m happy you’re here, Steve. Not right now, obviously, because you’re being a little b-”

“Thank you,” Steve says, before Danny can finish his insult. He’s deliberately curt about it.

“You’re welcome,” Danny replies, still just as snippy. It’s Danny’s body that betrays him, because he’s far less stiff now than he was a moment ago. As he’s helping Steve up the steps to the front door, his touch is… Gentle. That might be a good word.

*

They’re both in need of food when they get back, evidenced not in the last place by how they ended up sneering at each other. Steve hobbles to the bathroom and Danny goes to the kitchen, moving a lot more smoothly but while throwing I’m-not-worried-I’m-just-checking-to-see-if-I-need-to-yell-at-you-again looks over his shoulder all the way until Steve leaves his sight. 

There are painkillers in the medicine cabinet. Steve briefly considers taking one, and there are two Danny’s on his shoulder, one telling him to do it because there’s no reason to sit with the pain if he doesn’t have to and the other warning him that if he does, he’d better not start acting like nothing is wrong just because he can’t feel the wrongness anymore. He decides the second one probably knows him best and makes his way to the kitchen undrugged.

There’s a bag of something frozen wrapped in kitchen towels waiting for him on the counter. He sits down on one of the stools at the island, pulls his leg onto the next one, and pushes the cold compress to his ankle. “Thanks,” he tells Danny, who is cutting up tomatoes for already buttered slices of bread on a plate. It’s just one plate, but it’s too much food for Danny alone, so Steve is pretty sure he can just sit and wait and not go hungry.

“You’re an idiot,” Danny says, which means “you’re welcome” in Williams. 

Danny gets cheese from the fridge, generously covers every inch of buttery surface with at least one slice, and layers the tomatoes on top. He puts the cheese back, and Steve isn’t looking because he’s busy salivating over the nearly finished sandwiches, but then Danny is suddenly immediately on the other side of the kitchen island, somewhat awkwardly hovering there. 

Danny’s hands land on the marble, but for once, his focus is on Steve. “Look, Rachel and I, we keep thinking we might be good, and in theory, we might be. What do I know? But in reality we always drive each other crazy.” 

Steve sees where this is going. “Whereas we keep thinking we’ll drive each other crazy but we’re actually good?”

“No,” Danny says emphatically. He might be physically incapable of just admitting Steve is right. “We drive each other crazy _and_ we’re good.”

Steve balances on the edge of disagreeing, just for the sake of it, but his hungrily sentimental side wins out. He caves. “Alright. I can live with that.”

Danny makes an offended noise. “I would sure hope so.” Awkwardness lifted, he closes the sandwiches and slides the plate onto the kitchen island. He takes one and Steve, deciding this is enough of an invitation, takes the other.

The sandwich is pretty great, but totally unsurprisingly so, because Danny made it. Steve is two big bites in when his brain finally catches up and he pauses, confused. “Where did the cheese and tomatoes come from? You used all our cheese for the lasagna yesterday.” On second thought, it’s a different type anyway, and Danny wouldn’t have had time to make a second run to the store at any point since they arrived. The longest period Steve left his side was to go to the bathroom, and the most time consuming thing he did in there was wash his hands.

“Housekeeper stopped by while we were out and she stocked the fridge for us.” Danny points in the direction of the sink. “There’s a note.” 

And so there is, in the form of a little yellow square of sticky note on the white marble of the splashback. Steve almost gets up to read it, but he changes his mind just in time. He moves the compress to the other side of his ankle. “There’s a housekeeper?”

“Of course. I told you Brooke’s new beau was rich with a capital R. You didn’t think people like that cleaned their own half a dozen homes all over the globe, did you?”

Steve hums. “How much do you think that kind of thing costs? Might be nice not to have to do my own cleaning.”

Danny outright laughs in his face. “Like you’d be able to give that up. Your control freak nature very much includes deciding when something is spotless enough for your tastes.”

“Hey, I let you do the dishes sometimes.”

That was the perfect thing to say. Danny finishes chewing just so he can swallow and have his mouth free while he waves at Steve disbelievingly. “Forget it. I’m not going to be your housekeeper.”

“Could be fun,” Steve says. “Get you one of those feather dusters, a nice little maid’s outfit-”

“Did you hit your noggin when you encountered that chicken?”

“Might have.” Danny’s head jerks up in a clear sign he’s taking that too seriously. Steve backtracks before Danny can come around the island and comb his hair with probing fingers. “Not for real. I’m fine.”

Danny starts breathing again. “Of course you are,” he says, like he was always sure and unworried. “Your head is way too dense to crack open when you hit it against a little rock.”

“I didn’t hit it.” When he looks down, the sandwich is gone. It seems he ate it, so he looks up again. “And it was a mountain.”

Danny stuffs the last bite of his own lunch in his mouth and speaks through it, which is one of those things he always tries to forbid other people from doing but occasionally, when there are no kids around, will completely unapologetically lower himself to. He waves a finger while he chews and talks. “Small one.”

“Look at you being snobby about mountain size.”

The chewing makes place for a grin that’s clean from sandwich remains, but dirty in every other way. “There are certain areas in life where size does matter, Steve.” Danny, still grinning, grabs the plate to put it away in the dish washer. 

Steve graciously takes the opportunity to let that last comment slide, in spite of the myriad of openings for very obvious comebacks it leaves him with. It’s like having Danny kneel right in front of him – feels like playing with fire, and if he indulges himself, he might just find out he was made of matches this entire time.

*

After their late lunch, it’s time for Danny’s chosen activity of the day. Steve changes into his bathing suit, and Danny does the same and also arms himself with a towel, sunglasses and a jumbo sized bottle of sunscreen. What he thinks he needs the towel for is anyone’s guess, because it’s the kind of day where two seconds after you get out of the water, you’re dry enough again to qualify as a really good martini.

The sunscreen has a much clearer purpose. Danny dumps his stuff on one of the pool chairs, sits down, and starts the methodical process of covering every inch of his body from the tips of his ears to his little toes. 

Steve sits on the next chair and watches him in horrified fascination. “You’re gonna end up slippery enough you’ll need me to open the door for you if you want to get back into the house.”

Danny shakes his head while he rubs his left calf. “It’s the good stuff. Water resistant, but you hardly notice it after applying.” He picks the bottle up between two fingers, because apparently he does notice something on his hands despite all his big talk, and offers it to Steve. “Do my back for me, will you?”

“Sure,” Steve says, and confidently takes the sunscreen Danny offers him and moves to Danny’s chair for better reach, because there is nothing weird about it. It’s totally normal to squirt a long, zigzagging line of white on Danny’s smooth back that makes Danny shiver and mutter a curse because it’s cold, and to then put the bottle aside and rub his hands over Danny’s shoulders and neck and spine and to both sides in wide circles. It’s pure efficiency and a way to prevent Danny from having to choose between burned skin and risking injury by contorting himself to reach his own back, and there’s nothing sensual about it. He’s sliding his oily hands over the dizzying expanse of his best friend’s naked skin with completely platonic intentions.

Of course it would be great if Steve’s less conscious mind could grasp that distinction, too.

It’s just that he never does these kinds of things. He gives and receives hugs when there’s occasion and Danny in particular is a very tactile friend, but this right here, Steve with his bare hands on someone else’s bare skin, that’s been a while. That’s all it is.

Probably.

Steve stops short of dipping his fingers under the waistband of Danny’s swimming trunks. “Done,” he declares. He rubs his hands on his own knees to get rid of the excess oil and the tingling feeling just under the surface of his skin. It’s more effective for one than the other.

“Need me to do you?” Danny asks, which is of course also a perfectly acceptable and platonic thing to ask a friend.

“Nah,” Steve deflects, because all he’s wearing is a glorified pair of underwear and if he says yes, he’s going to end up with a far too visible problem. “I’m good. I don’t burn.” He hopes. The day did just go from feeling pleasantly sunny to worryingly hot.

Danny bristles, which is a nice distraction. “You don’t burn? Have fun being a wrinkly, saggy mess of a human being in twenty years.”

“Don’t worry, I have good genes. My dad aged gracefully.” Not that John ever got to be as old as Steve will be in twenty years’ time, but Steve’s never too sure he’ll make it to that point himself, so that’s not something he wants to waste time worrying about. Danny does that enough for the both of them.

Right now, Danny shakes his head as if in disappointment, gets up to put the bottle of sunscreen on the lanai railing where it’s out of the sun, and then dives into the deep end of the pool with no more dawdling and surprising grace.

Steve is left a little breathless, which is stupid. He’s fully aware Danny was never lying when he claimed he was a strong swimmer. He’s known that for years, even if, not unlike certain other things he suddenly seems to be rediscovering about Danny, he may have tried to deny it for a large chunk of that time.

Danny comes up near the middle of the pool, pushes the water out of his face, and squints at Steve. “Are you just going to sit there?”

“Just waiting to see whether I’d need to rescue you,” Steve throws back, and then he gets up and dives in and makes it all the way to the other side without coming up for air. The water is cool and familiar and clears his head, like it always does. Tastes a little too much like chlorine and not enough like salt, but there’s nothing for that.

“Show off,” Danny mutters, timed perfectly so Steve’s ears are above the surface and Steve can hear him.

It makes Steve grin. “Race you,” he says. Danny starts to protest, things about how he’d be crazy to take on a semi-aquatic being and he’s still in the middle of the pool so it’s a rigged game anyway, but Steve ducks his head under the water again and misses most of it. 

If only it were that simple to block out everything he doesn’t feel like dealing with.

*

They spend a couple of hours in and around the pool, dipping in and out, drying up and getting wet again. Danny spends more time on land than Steve does, but anyone surprised by that has likely never met them before. 

Besides, Steve finds he needed a swim even more than he thought he did. It’s just the two of them, and while that isn’t and shouldn’t be new, it feels surprisingly intimate. At home, it’s usually the two of them and a case, or the two of them and Eddie, or the two of them and Junior or Grace or Charlie, or at the very least the two of them and beers and a familiar setting and some sort of invisible deadline. They’ll have an evening, and then Danny goes home, and the next morning they’re thrown back into a completely different dynamic at the office with their entire team around them.

There’s nothing like that here and Steve isn’t prepared for how much he likes that thought. He has Danny all to himself for the foreseeable future, and Danny just explicitly told him he wants him here, and it makes Steve feel affectionate and a little off his game in a way he didn’t even know he could be. They haven’t been away from home for much over twenty-four hours and already lines are starting to blur that he’d made himself forget ever even drawing in the sand between them in the first place.

He keeps catching himself _looking_.

Like when Danny heaves himself up onto the edge of the pool, which is really nothing special. Steve’s a SEAL and he lives in Hawaii, so a guy getting out of the water is not a particularly novel or arresting sight. But.

Well, it’s Danny, for one.

Water is wet and Danny Williams is hot. Both facts of life, now inexorably linked.

Which is a little problematic, because Steve comes into contact with water a lot in his day to day life. He can’t get distracted thinking about Danny’s shoulders every time he takes a shower. That’d be inconvenient. That’d be-

“Hey!”

He snaps his head up to see Danny still sitting on the edge of the pool, eyebrows raised sarcastically. Steve realizes he’s clutching the pool edge in a different corner and loosens his grip before he ends up with two strain injuries. “What?”

Danny snaps his fingers in front of his own face. “I was trying to get your attention. Where did your mind fly off to just now?”

Thinking about you in the shower, Steve doesn’t say. “What do you want?” It comes out a little too brusque and has Danny’s eyebrows creep even further towards his hairline, so Steve clears his throat and tries again. “Sorry. What’s up?”

“I was asking if you wanted to get started on dinner yet. Judging by the sun-”

“Judging by the _sun_?” Steve interrupts, because he just can’t help himself. 

“Yeah,” Danny says, unapologetically. “I can guess the time in Hawaii by the path of the sun these days. You’re rubbing off on me.”

A really stupid giggle-like snort escapes Steve before he can reign it in. He pushes off from the pool wall to make his way to the ladder, intentionally making enough of a splash that it doesn’t give Danny much of a chance for a quickfire smart remark. “Yeah,” he says, grabbing the ladder and not watching Danny, “I could eat. Let’s eat.”

When he’s standing and finally does look over because it’s been too quiet, Danny is looking at him like he’s gone crazy. He might have, so that’s fair enough. “Alright then,” Danny says. “Let me grab a quick shower first.”

*

Steve goes inside. He puts on a shirt and some real shorts and goes back out. He takes a picture of the view and sends it to Mary while he’s waiting for Danny to be finished in the bathroom, and he definitely doesn’t think about what Danny’s doing in the shower one bit. 

*

Vacation, in Danny’s world, means time for him to spend on preparing elaborate homecooked meals. Steve suspects it might have a little to do with the kitchen – Danny still lingers, full of longing, every time he so much as gets a glass of water – but Steve won’t complain, because for all that he’s apparently now locked in a fierce battle for his best friend with a slab of marble, Danny’s cooking might be worth it. There’s a reason they were going to open up a restaurant together.

The thing is, Danny’s skill and general personality also translate into him being very particular about anything that goes into a dish he’s preparing.

“What?” Steve asks, the first time that Danny looks over at the way he’s chopping the bell pepper that he was handed. 

Danny raises his eyebrows, purses his lips in clear judgment and shakes his head. “Nope. Nothing.” Steve tries to let it go, but it doesn’t work for long, because Danny leaves his very special sauce recipe unsupervised to throw critical glances at Steve’s chopping again, and this time he doesn’t even give Steve the time to ask about it. “Jesus Christ, buddy, I asked you to chop it, not kill it.”

“You wanted it finely chopped,” Steve says, because it’s true. Those were the instructions he was given, and he’s good at following orders when he wants to be. He’s starting not to want to be. “Besides, I’m pretty sure it would’ve been dead once I’d sliced it in half and taken its innards out if it had ever been alive. Wouldn’t need to keep going for that.”

“Alright, then stop-” Danny comes a step closer and waves a hand in frustration while he’s looking for the right word. “Mincing it.”

“Mincing?” Steve repeats, just because he knows it’ll be annoying.

“Yes! Mangle, hack, cleave, axe murder. Stop those things.”

Steve looks down at his own work. He’ll admit the half he’s been working on is maybe a little overly finely chopped – Danny did ask him for a fine chop, not slivers – but like hell is he backing down now. “I’m not doing any of those things.”

“Yes, you are. What’s up with that? I thought you were supposed to be good with a knife, huh?”

“I _am_ good with a knife.” If anything, his overzealousness should be a testament to that, and it’s Danny’s problem if he doesn’t read it that way.

Which he clearly doesn’t, because he has the gall to demand, “Prove it. Show me.”

Steve, jaw set, stares at Danny in utter frustration. He doesn’t often experience a moment of blankness caused by indecision, but his instinct to always give 110% to prove his skill is waging war against his never ceasing desire to mess with Danny, and as it turns out they are very equally matched in strength.

“Go on,” Danny says, and waves a hand again, and that decides it.

Steve grabs the knife, turns it sideways, and starts hitting the bell pepper with the flat side of the blade. The first time a few of the smallest pieces he cut are dramatically launched off the cutting board, the second time nothing much happens, and he never gets to see what the effect of the third hit would have been, because a strong hand closes around his wrist and stops him.

“You maniac!” Danny is yelling, because of course he is. “What are you doing? That’s not- Jesus, do I have to do everything around here?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, kind of enraged now too. “Do you?”

“Apparently!” Danny comes even closer and mutters something angry about Steve being way too tall for a human being while he plasters himself to Steve’s side from behind, not looking over Steve’s shoulder, but right past it. It’s around this time that Steve starts to realize he’s made a mistake and that with the state of his ankle, he can’t even move away casually. None of that stops Danny from sliding his pleasantly warm hand from Steve’s wrist to cover Steve’s own hand around the knife. Danny’s other hand is on Steve’s back. As far as attempts to throw Danny off his rhythm go, this backfired spectacularly on Steve.

His mind is spinning trying to remember exactly how low was _I wanna bang you_ low according to Danny’s own rules when he was freaking out about his sister and her colleague a few years ago.

“This,” Danny says, with a lot of emphasis. He’s not talking about the placement of his hand. He makes Steve lift the knife and bring it back down in a smooth rolling motion, and then again three quarters of an inch further along. “ _This_ is how you cut a pepper.”

“You telling me this is a two-man job?”

“It is if one of them is you. Idiot.” With a last squeeze that could be meant as punishment as easily as encouragement, Danny lets go and unsticks himself from Steve’s side, returning to the sauce he still seems to be remember the existence of. That’s impressive. Steve wouldn’t have.

“Yeah, sure.” Steve watches Danny stir the sauce out of the side of his eye and carefully doesn’t clear his throat. “Love you too, man.”

Danny huffs his laugh onto the spoonful of liquid he was blowing on to cool it for testing. “Like that was ever in question.”

It’s not quite what Steve wants to hear, but that doesn’t mean Danny isn’t right.

*

After all the excitement of a long, warm day, they have a slow and easy evening. They take their dinner in the dining room, head to the couch to channel surf for a bit on the ginormous tv screen until they hit a Friends rerun marathon and settle on that for a few episodes, and then they move outside again. It’s just like the day before, but this time they take a bottle of whiskey with them in place of the beers, and they bring it all the way to the beach instead of getting stuck by the pool. There’s a gentle breeze, the background hum of the ocean is soothing, and they’ve both mellowed out after a large meal and some time with nothing to do except put their feet up.

Steve carries both their glasses and the bottle when they head back inside, mostly because Danny looks like he’s already sleepwalking and broken glass wouldn’t match the decor. Danny keeps grabbing Steve’s shoulder and arm on the way, bumping into him or holding on for a bit. It’s unclear if it’s a veiled attempt to help Steve with his ankle, if Danny thinks he’s drunk enough to need the guidance, or if Danny just feels like it, but Steve doesn’t really want to know. 

Getting ready for bed is likewise a quiet affair. It would be as perfect as an evening can be, but when Danny is done in the bathroom and rolls onto the mattress with a groan and flicks off his bedside lamp, Steve’s mind is whispering at him that there’s something still unfinished about the day, in spite of the heaviness in his limbs. “Night,” Danny says.

Steve could echo that, but there are other words on the tip of his tongue. He closes his eyes, feels unimaginably needy, and fights his way through it to say, “Love you, buddy.”

That makes Danny hum a laugh. “You’re very verbally affectionate today.” Danny sighs, like he’s getting settled in, and then, finally: “I love you too.”

Parts of Steve unclench that he wasn’t even aware were straining. This time, genuinely nothing about these sleeping arrangements is weird, because this is just the way things are supposed to be: the two of them together, Danny telling him he still loves him. Steve relaxes into the mattress and he’s out like a light within the next four breaths.

He dreams of water and knives and a hand on his back. Lower, lower, lower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it to here, thank you for sticking with this fic in spite of its erratic update schedule! You're rad. If you like my writing, consider letting me know by dropping a comment, aka the greatest gift a fic writer can receive. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


	4. Day 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore or Sean Connery?” Danny asks, when Steve presents this last argument.
> 
> “George Lazenby,” Steve says, just to watch Danny go a little apoplectic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! As promised, this fic is definitely still happening, even if it is with very slow and erratic updates. Hope you've all had a good five months. 💪

He wakes up with a problem. Danny, in stark contrast to a particular one of Steve’s body parts, is still asleep, so Steve lies there for a bit, halfheartedly willing the moment to pass on its own.

It doesn’t. It’s a very stubborn moment that doesn’t seem to mind Danny’s deep breathing right behind his back at all.

He gives in and gets up. He grabs some clean clothes and locks the bathroom door behind him, and valiantly pretends for a bit that he’s stepping into the shower with the sole purpose of getting clean. He washes his hair, his neck, his pits, his chest, and he lets a hand slip down to where it really wants to be from there. He’s about to get really into personal hygiene when there’s three rapid knocks at the door.

“Steve?”

It’s Danny’s voice. 

Obviously it’s Danny’s voice, because there’s nobody else around, but Steve is off his guard enough that it still manages to startle him. He lets go of his dick so he won’t be standing there holding an erection while talking to a completely oblivious Danny. Doesn’t feel right. “Yeah?” he yells back, over the continued clatter of the shower.

“Just checking to see you hadn’t drowned,” Danny replies. “It’s been well over three minutes.”

Steve turns his head into the spray and lets the water beat down on his face. “They changed the rules for Navy showers,” he calls, and has to spit out some water after.

“I see,” Danny says, and Steve really hopes he doesn’t.

Danny seems to think he’s made his point and that it’s okay if Steve wants to finish his shower in peace after that, but the illusion of privacy is well and truly shattered. He turns the handle that regulates the temperature all the way to the other end and grits his teeth. A cold shower might never be fun, but it’s very invigorating and good for the immune system. Just what he needs.

Almost.

*

Almost is not quite enough, so he goes for a long, refreshing, lonely swim. It feels good to be surrounded by open ocean instead of chlorine, and it feels even better to get in a decent workout for his body that’s totally mindless exercise, nothing more and nothing less.

Of a different form than he almost let himself have, because what the fuck.

*

Although, really, what’s so what the fuck about it anyway? It’s not that he was consciously thinking of Danny. He wasn’t.

At some point he would have been if Danny hadn’t interrupted, but dealing in woulds and coulds is liable to drive a person crazy, so he tries to avoid that.

He grasps for something more familiar and is reminded of Lynn instead. It’s been a year since he last saw her, but there’s been no other woman since to replace her – mostly because he hasn’t looked, exactly like Danny and much more recently Mary accused him of, but that’s beside the point.

Lynn was cool and fun and so very, very hot, but after two years of pretty casual dating they both realized the relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Steve didn’t even really mind. Someone nice who liked him and that he had good sex with once a week seemed like a very comfortable and efficient way to take care of the one desire in his life that otherwise went unmet, but Lynn still wanted more. Of course she deserved more, so they let each other go.

The problem, as Steve is growing closer and closer to realizing in spite of his continued efforts to pull the brakes, is Danny. Having both a girlfriend and a best friend is fine, it’s awesome, it’s wonderful, but that’s never what it feels like anymore. With Lynn, things hit a point where it felt more like he was perpetually cheating on someone while he also wasn’t even sure who that person was, exactly. 

Perhaps it’s all a _lot_ less what the fuck than he’d like to think.

*

When he leaves the ocean and crosses through the living room on his way to the bathroom, Danny’s at the stove in the open kitchen. Danny’s eyes are on him from the moment he comes in, so he tries to look both annoyed and reassuring. One comes a lot more naturally than the other. “I’m keeping off my ankle, don’t worry.”

“That’s not it.” Danny circles a finger at Steve’s whole being, but he’s probably trying to indicate Steve’s having recently come from the water, considering his words right after. “Doesn’t swimming in fish pee defeat the purpose of your shower?”

Like Danny has any idea what the purpose of his shower was. Like _Steve_ does. “I’m going to take another one now.” Hopefully one that’s less confusing.

Danny huffs, totally unconfused. “You’re making me glad I don’t have to pay the water bill for this place. Hey, come over here for a sec and taste this for me.”

Steve slings his towel around his neck and hobbles up the steps to the kitchen, taking care with his ankle, because he promised he would. He’s still dripping a little.

“Here,” Danny says, holding out a fork with a bite of egg and vegetable scramble, cupping his other hand under it in case anything falls down. He’s holding it so high Steve doesn’t have much choice but to open his mouth and let Danny spoon feed him. 

He hums while he chews. “It’s good. Little more pepper?”

Danny nods like that’s the answer he was looking for. “Yeah, thought so.” He lowers his fork, but instead of going for the fancy glass and chrome pepper grinder, he does a kind of double take of Steve, like he’s suddenly remembering Steve came straight from the ocean. “Jesus,” he says, on a half laugh, a little startled. “If anyone could see us now.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.” Danny takes a step back and puts the fork down. “Something.”

Steve feels that, deep in his bones. “Maybe they’d be jealous,” he offers.

“Maybe,” Danny agrees. He looks up, sees Steve still standing there and flaps a hand at him, whatever momentary spell he was under broken just like that. “Go, take your shower before this is cold again by the time you’re done. I’m not waiting for you.”

Steve goes and takes his shower, and when he’s all done six minutes later, Danny is mysteriously only just plating the egg, definitely totally not having waited for Steve at all.

*

The egg is great, with the perfect amount of pepper. Steve insists on taking the plates to the kitchen even when Danny tells him to stay put at the table. It’s not so much chivalry as the feeling that he really doesn’t need to be coddled, but the fair division of labor is a nice byproduct. Danny cooks, Steve clears the table – it’s almost domestic.

He washes and dries the plates and the pan, too. He’s just that great of a kinda-husband.

When he’s done, he joins Danny, who’s sagged out on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table, committing to an after brunch doze. “So what’s the plan for today?” Steve asks.

Danny’s eyes blink open. He doesn’t look tired, just lazy, to the point where at first he doesn’t even bother getting worked up enough to make the argument he seems to be trying to start actually sound like one. “No plan. A holiday doesn’t have a plan.”

“Sometimes it does,” Steve counters. It’s not even a reply that makes a lot of sense for him, because the few times in life he chose to travel just for fun he usually went into things with no idea how his days would play out. The difference is that he did that by starting at the edge of a forest or the foot of a mountain and seeing where the path took him, not by cooping himself up in a luxury mini-mansion with an injury and nowhere to go.

Danny is peering at Steve’s foot, which is up on the table next to Danny’s, and which he’s been tapping in the air. It alerts Steve to what he’s been doing, so he stops.

“Okay, I’ve decided on a plan,” Danny says, because Steve was way too late. Danny grabs the remote from the arm of the couch. “We’re having a movie day.” 

Steve makes sure his skepticism can’t go unnoticed as the TV bursts to life. “A movie? It’s not even noon yet.”

“So? This might surprise you, but movies are not like gremlins. You can watch them both before and after midnight and it’s fine.”

“Yeah, but it’s weird. Like alcohol. Mostly socially acceptable in the evening and best enjoyed in small quantities.”

Danny swings the remote worryingly close to Steve’s thigh in a gesture that is half threat, half entreaty. “Movies are not at all like alcohol. I let my children have them.”

And that’s a good defense. Steve can’t argue with that, because he’d implicitly be arguing against Danny as a dad, which he’s not prepared to do. He can still sigh very dramatically, however. Nothing stopping him from some extreme theatrics. “A movie it is.”

“Hey,” Danny says, surprised yet intrigued, “this TV has an external hard drive full of James Bond.”

*

Apparently Brooke’s rich fiancé is a huge Bond afficionado. Steve likes him the better for it if for no other reason than that it helps prevent the otherwise inevitable argument with Danny about what movie to watch on Netflix. If the first thing you stumble upon when turning on a TV is a hard drive full of every Bond movie in existence, you should probably make use of it.

Not that it totally cuts out the argument part – the sensible thing to do would of course be to start at Dr. No, but Danny has the remote and he decides they should instead start with the first movie in the soft reboot of the Daniel Craig era just because he remembers he loved it when he saw it in theaters back in Jersey. Steve thinks this makes no sense, because it’s neither the actual first movie nor the last movie nor the best Bond actor. 

“Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore or Sean Connery?” Danny asks, when Steve presents this last argument.

“George Lazenby,” Steve says, just to watch Danny go a little apoplectic.

Maybe a movie day can be kind of fun, after all.

*

After talking over most of Craig’s debut in Casino Royale, they roll right along into Quantum of Solace, and they’re forty minutes into loudly discussing that one when Danny decides they should have something to munch on mindlessly. Danny is in the kitchen area but on his way back, as evidenced by the distinct sound of popcorn being poured out into a bowl and Danny muttering “ow, fuck!” because it’s hot, when a phone starts to ring. 

It’s Danny’s, on the coffee table in front of Steve. When Steve glances at the screen, a smiling picture of Grace looks back at him. “Danny!” he calls. This is not something Danny’s going to want to miss.

Danny returns to the TV area with a big rainbow striped bowl. “Apparently even millionaires eat microwave popcorn. Can you imagine having a seven figure bank account and stocking up on the ramen noodles of snacks?”

“Danny,” Steve says again, holding the phone out to him while also groping around on the couch for the remote and the pause button. He finds it before Danny gets what’s up with the phone. “It’s your daughter.”

Those are words Danny understands – he nearly drops the bowl before Steve saves it. They switch, Steve holding the bowl and Danny the phone, and Danny finally accepts the request for a videocall. He sits down on the couch, but angled away from Steve, so Steve has only Danny’s face to watch.

He hears what sounds like both of the kids greeting Danny with shouts of dad and Danno, immediately followed by just Grace’s voice. “Where’s Steve?”

Danny makes eye contact with Steve over the phone even while he’s talking to the kids. “Where’s Steve? That’s the first thing you say to me? No ‘how are you, Danno’, or ‘are you enjoying your vacation, dad’?”

“That all depends on Uncle Steve,” Grace reasons, which has Steve grinning like an idiot. Those kids are definitely too smart for their own good. 

Danny is looking at him again, this time with an angry-fond look. It’s a particular specialty of his. “Alright Uncle Steve, come over here. You heard the kids, and apparently it’s not me they want.”

That yields two voices at once vehemently protesting that they definitely do want their Danno. It’s exactly what Danny was fishing for, and Steve adds to the list of things Danny asks for and immediately gets by moving over until he can see the phone screen and he’s leaning into Danny in the tiny rectangle that shows the camera’s view. 

“We want both of you,” Charlie is saying, so nothing has changed about Steve’s grin by the time he gets a little torrent of hellos of his own. He’s Uncle Steve to them and that’s not something he’ll ever grow tired of.

“Hey you two. How are my all-time favorite Williamses?”

Charlie giggles and Danny smiles. It seems to take Danny a moment to realize everyone is now waiting for his response. “What? I am not even a little bit offended at that. You’re my favorite Williamses too. It’s just common sense.”

Steve nods. That’s a good point.

“I didn’t hear an answer. How are you? Is your grandma treating you well?”

“You’re with your grandmother?” Steve asks. That’s the first he’s heard of it. He’d assumed that now that Rachel didn’t go with Danny, she’d be with the kids, though it makes sense that they’d already made some kind of arrangement before the original plan fell apart.

“Yes,” Charlie chirps. “Yesterday she bought us ice cream and new clothes and a computer game and then we went to a movie.”

That sounds like someone who has more money to throw around than Clara Williams. Steve glances at Danny, who returns his look briefly in a way that says _yes, unfortunately_. “Wow!” Danny says, half to the kids, half as an implicit answer to Steve’s unasked question. “Sounds like Amanda is really spoiling you.”

Steve can’t help his huff of laughter. Danny is a great dad and would never let on to his kids that he has problems with either Rachel or Rachel’s mom, but it has to require some immense self-discipline on the inside. “That’s awesome,” he says to Charlie and Grace. And he means it – if Danny would let him, he’d treat them the same way Amanda does. “Where’s your mother?”

“On a spa weekend,” Charlie says, like he just learned a new word and is probably quoting the person that explained it to him verbatim. He’s talkative today and it makes Steve want to reach out through the screen and ruffle his hair very badly. “It’s when you go to the sauna like the one in Stan’s old house but bigger and then you get your nails done.”

Steve nods. “Yeah, your dad and I know all about that.”

Danny shakes his head a little, but doesn’t try to contradict him. The only way he could is by admitting that he skipped out on nearly all of the activities Melissa had planned for him during that weird Valentine’s double date back when they both still had women to take with them on holiday. That is, before they ended up sequestered in a luxury holiday home with just the two of them, not a single woman in sight.

“It’s actually more like a spa week,” Grace says. “Grandma says we should all be jealous and that you’re missing out, dad.”

“I think your mother appreciates the time to herself,” Danny says, diplomatically.

Grace nods, but with more animated conviction than Danny’s somewhat muted statement. “That’s what I said! The two of you going on holiday together is a much better idea.”

Steve likes that, but Danny does a curious little head tilt. “Yeah, you think so?”

Grace doesn’t get a chance to respond to Danny’s surprisingly genuine question. Both her and Charlie’s eyes are drawn to something off screen and lowly, in the background, the phone picks up another voice. “Darlings, is that your father on the line?”

It sounds like an older woman. An English older woman, but not Judi Dench’s M.

“Oh no,” Steve breathes. Danny doesn’t say a thing, but his smile is suddenly a lot more like a rictus grin. He clamps a hand around Steve’s wrist, like he’s pre-empting any attempts on Steve’s part to find some other place he needs to be. Steve wouldn’t really have tried that, not after last time Danny’s ex-mother-in-law was in Hawaii and Steve met her for the first time and he, in retrospect, left Danny to fend for himself in his own corner way too much, but he won’t deny that the thought of making a run for it crossed his mind.

There’s some shuffling and rearranging on the other end of the connection, and then Amanda Savage’s perfectly styled curls and sweetly passive-aggressive face move into the frame, as she squeezes in close next to Charlie. “Hello, Daniel. Ah, and you’ve taken your handsome friend with you in Rachel’s stead. Are you sure you still don’t want those cufflinks I bought you, Steven? I still have them after you decided to return them.”

“No, thanks, Mandy.”

“Never thought I’d see you refuse free stuff,” Danny mutters under his breath. In retaliation Steve uses his still trapped hand to pinch Danny’s leg, because yeah, he’d have liked to keep those cufflinks, actually, but some free things are not worth the price. Danny in turn knocks his knee into Steve’s to let him know he didn’t appreciate that.

“What are you men doing?” Amanda asks sharply. Apparently more of that was noticeable over the video connection than Steve would’ve thought, even if it was out of frame. “If you’re going to say something, speak up, Daniel.”

“It’s nothing, Mandy,” Steve says, jumping in before whatever slightly barbed thing was on Danny’s tongue right then can slip out. “Daniel here was just reminding me I should’ve charged my phone last night, because I’m afraid we’re going to have to hang up on you soon. Battery’s running out.”

“Oh no, that’s such a shame!” Amanda exclaims, in a way that is so affected it’s entirely unclear whether she means it or not. Meanwhile Grace’s eyebrows go up – she called, so she knows she dialed Danny’s number and definitely not Steve’s – but she has an amused look on her that makes Steve think she’ll cover for his lie. She’s easily old and clever enough to have figured out that her dad and her maternal grandmother are not the best mix, however much Danny tries to shield her from any tension.

Danny jumps in to add some believability to the excuse, and Amanda sternly admonishes Steve on his lack of foresight, yet somehow still perceptibly less sternly than she most definitely would have if Danny had been cast as the guilty party in this lie. Everyone gets a chance to say their goodbyes at length, seeing as Danny’s phone battery is still at a very comfortable 74%, and then finally Danny taps the end call button.

He dumps the phone on the table next to the forgotten and rapidly cooling popcorn, and then sags against the backrest of the couch while blowing out a deep breath. Steve just watches him for a moment, so he gets caught when Danny rolls his head around to look at him. “Hey,” Danny says, “thanks.”

“Least I could do.”

Danny doesn’t try to contradict that. “Did you really give back those expensive cufflinks she bought you?”

“Yeah.” It was only after Danny had finally had enough that day and walked away from their lunch at Kamekona’s that Steve actually understood how much Amanda’s smiling barbs cut into him. Steve couldn’t in good conscience keep the gift, at that point – it had been too much right from the start, but that’s because it was nothing but yet another way for Amanda to make Danny feel small by giving it to Steve right in front of him and not getting Danny so much as a thank you card.

Danny doesn’t look small now. He looks pensive. “Likes free stuff, but can’t be bought. You’d make a lousy politician.”

Steve figures, looking around at the room he’s in now, that he probably can be bought, just not when he’s already sold. Danny never needed a bungalow for that.

While Danny seems relieved he didn’t have to continue his call with Amanda, he also seems bummed that he didn’t get more time with Grace and Charlie. Steve grasps at straws for a distraction. “Gonna have to call my kid now, or he’ll start to feel neglected,” he says, just because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. He slips his phone from his pocket and taps at it, for the optimal experience of bewilderment.

“Your kid?” Danny questions, and the surprise seems to get some life back into him, exactly as intended. He stretches his neck to spy what’s on Steve’s phone screen and he sees Junior’s name while Steve hits the call button on the contact. Steve may tilt his phone a little to make sure Danny can read it. 

“He’ll be missing me,” Steve says, as he holds the phone up a bit for a better camera angle.

Danny pulls a face. “Okay. I know we joke about Tani and Junior as the kids, but that’s kind of weird. You know you’re being weird, right?”

Steve ignores Danny. “Howzit, Junes?”

On the screen, Junior grins and throws a reflexive shaka sign. “Howzit,” he says, more like a fact than a question. There’s a bit of that question in his face, though.

Steve will gladly answer it for him, because he’s not the one this charade is for. “Can you put Eddie on the line for me?”

The responses that gets are instantaneous and highly variable. Right next to Steve, Danny groans and slides down on the couch like he’s given up, but on the phone screen, Junior’s question dissolves into amusement. “Yes sir.”

A moment later, the view jumps to the other camera lens on Junior’s phone. It shows the doorway from the living room to the kitchen, one of Eddie’s particular favorite spots to stretch out. Eddie lifts his head from his paws when Junior approaches. “Hey buddy,” Steve says, in the voice he only uses when he talks to little kids, cats or Eddie. “Are you being a good boy?”

Eddie sits up and his tail wags, but he doesn’t really seem to know where to look.

Danny has apparently had enough once again. He takes their empty water pitcher from the coffee table and gets up. “You’re an idiot,” he tells Steve, in passing, as he rounds the couch, and that’s when Eddie looks right at the camera for the first time.

Steve can’t stop grinning. This co-parenting thing goes both ways.

* 

By the time they have their fresh pitcher with ice and all the phone calls are finished, the popcorn is at precise room temperature. Steve doesn’t really mind – cold popcorn is still good enough to shovel into your mouth by the handful. They watch the rest of the movie they’d started, and then they’re returned to the screen showing the contents of the external Bond drive, and the next one’s up. Two Craig films down, still two to go, because for some reason nobody ever told these people to stop cranking out movies every few years.

Danny has snatched up the remote, but he doesn’t hit play immediately. It’s getting to be late afternoon. “Need to take a break?”

Steve does, kind of. He’s not the binge-watching type and they’ve been hanging on this couch since late morning. They’ve only had pee breaks, snack gathering breaks, and one and half phone call, but still, if Danny’s going to ask the question like that, Steve’s own needs are irrelevant. It becomes an endurance test. “Do _you_ need a break?”

Danny looks at him like he knows exactly what’s going on in Steve’s brain, but then he gets sucked into it anyway. “No,” he says, in that way competitive people have where they’re almost offended that you could think they might want to give up first. “I was just asking if _you_ -”

“Well I don’t,” Steve says, right through him. “Hit play anytime.”

Danny does, and Steve settles in and they listen to Adele sing about the sky falling and watch overpaid actors talk and run around for another hour or so. Halfway through the movie they hit a point where the bad guy has Bond tied to a chair so he can monologue at him about his evil misdeeds – not in fact as common an occurrence as fiction would have the general public think – and then switches to different tactics in an effort to find Bond’s weak spot and unsettle him. He undoes one of the buttons on Bond’s shirt and strokes his thighs and says that there’s a first time for everything and Steve doesn’t think much of it, except that it’s a sufficiently creepy scene.

Apparently Danny experiences the whole thing differently. “What makes you think this is my first time?” Bond asks, just as low and intimate as the villain, and it’s the perfect response because it shows that if there’s a way to make him nervous, this is not it. But then while the villain drops his seduction scheme and figures out his next move, Danny suddenly asks, not low or intimate at all, “Do you think Bond has ever banged any guys?”

He says it the same way they’ve been talking about whether the action scenes are any good and if the plots make sense, but at the same time this is not like those casual remarks at all. Steve blinks at the screen, which suddenly doesn’t register anymore. “Banged?” he questions. That’s some vocabulary choice. 

Danny hums, which could mean any number of things. “You have a habit of focusing on the wrong words when someone’s sexuality is questioned. Did you know that?”

Steve did not, but with all the dancing he does around these kinds of questions and Danny’s love of language, he can’t be very surprised that Danny would have noticed. “Why are there any right words in the first place?” he wonders, out loud. “What does it matter?”

Danny hums again. “As a kid, I always wanted to be like Bond. Must have watched some of those old movies a dozen times.”

Somehow, that both fans the flame of Steve’s ill-advised hopes and feels like a splash of cold water all at once. Is this Danny connecting himself to Bond’s possible bisexuality, or is it Danny saying Bond had better be straight? “Well,” Steve says, lightly so as to cover up what he’s actually thinking, “that explains your thing for British accents.”

Danny snorts. He’s right that that’s a little funny after they hung up on Amanda not too long ago. “Right, okay. Want to give me any more deep insights into the subconscious reasoning behind my love life, doctor?”

“Well.” Steve gets into his bit and rubs his non-existent goatee. “I certainly don’t remember a movie where Bond models Victoria’s Secret.”

“Ever heard of a Bond girl? For most boys watching these things, Bond is not the one that gives them their sexual awakening.”

Steve snorts. “I always thought the action scenes were the best parts.”

“Of course you would.” Danny holds up both his hands, palms up, like he’s weighing invisible objects. “Gorgeous half-naked woman here, big gun there. Which one will Steve McGarrett choose?”

Steve looks at Danny’s open hands. “I can’t have both?”

“Greedy bastard,” Danny says, fondly, at which point Steve feels this may be straying a little too close to a metaphor he doesn’t care to look into, so he makes a noise in protest and drops it, pretending to get drawn back into the chase scene happening on screen. 

He does appreciate big guns, after all. That’s the problem.

*

After Skyfall – and after Bond decidedly did not bang the creepy blond guy, to Steve’s mixed relief – the clock screams it’s time for dinner. They could either order in or scrounge something up in the kitchen, so they argue about that for a bit in a conversation where they accidentally switch positions two times. In the end Steve is the one insisting they need food immediately, while Danny says they should just order in and suffer through another hour of empty stomachs for the sake of convenience and more movie-day-appropriate food, so they attempt some form of compromise in which Steve makes himself something small to eat while Danny, having leveraged Steve’s history of control freak tendencies, gets to pick what they’ll have delivered for dinner. 

As such Danny is sitting on the kitchen counter, scrolling through his phone to get an idea of their options, when Steve puts a pan on the stove. Danny glances at it, goes back to his phone, and then does a doubletake. “An egg? You’re going to boil a single egg? We had egg this morning.”

“Not a boiled egg,” Steve says. He feels he may have conceded a bit much in their negotiations just now, so he needs to be a little pigheaded to assert dominance. He’s not even really starving yet, but by God, he’s going to eat that single boiled egg. “Egg’s healthy. Lots of protein.”

“You’re a lot of protein,” Danny shoots back.

“That makes no sense.”

“You make no sense.”

That still doesn’t make any sense, so Steve just shakes his head and pretends to do something useful stirring the water while he waits for it to boil. He feels like smiling. It’s stupid, because there’s no reason to smile, because Danny’s being an idiot and Steve’s spent the entire day arguing with him about every word they’ve said to each other and they’ve been watching way too much TV for a day spent on a gorgeous island with beautiful weather and a private beach close by, but none of that seems to matter much. Or maybe it does, but the way it matters is that he’s learning that this kind of doing jack shit is exactly what he wants from his days off, even if he never would have let himself try it just a few years ago.

The part that matters is Danny, which he also wouldn’t have let himself acknowledge a few years ago. Not the way he’s starting to now.

Danny orders them Indian food, which even he knows how to eat by now. They don’t need another stakeout in an old cat lady’s apartment with a soundtrack of endless lesbian sex from their surveillance equipment for that, which is good, because thinking back that was an entirely surreal experience. And if two women together can keep going and going and going, does that mean if two men get together it’s over twice as quickly? If he had sex with Danny, would they be able to finish in the time it takes to soft boil an egg?

He finds he kind of likes that thought. Very efficient. They could even take their time once in a while, because he likes his yolks firm, anyway.

“What’re you thinking about?” Danny asks. He’s still on the counter, but he’s finished with their order, so he’s put his phone away and is watching Steve, the way Steve watched him at the stove yesterday. The way they’ve both been watching each other since they got here.

Steve is not really startled out of his thoughts, but he is in a weird mood. “Sex,” he says, which is the kind of thing that usually, they wouldn’t talk about that directly. They’re loud and opinionated about everything, except when they’re not.

Danny’s eyebrows twitch. “If you’re gonna try to fuck the egg, at least let it cool down first.”

Apparently this is still a ‘when they’re not’ situation.

Steve looks at the egg, gently bobbing up and down in the boiling water. “How would that even-” He can see Danny open his mouth out of the corner of his eyes, so he whips his head up, together with a splayed hand. “Wait! I changed my mind. I don’t want to ask that.”

Danny inclines his head. “Probably for the best.”

Steve agrees. Not the kind of sex talk they should have, if any.

*

Dinner comes midway through Craig’s fourth and so far last portrayal of Bond, and Steve is glad when Danny is finally done tipping the delivery guy and they can spread the steaming hot containers of food out over the coffee table. Steve adds in some beer so cold that the bottles are already sweating, and then they have their feast while they keep commenting on how this movie is good but not as good as the last one, which might be the first thing they’ve agreed on all day. 

Eventually, the food is gone and the credits roll. “So,” Danny says. They’ve made it all the way through the Craig era; they’re free to go do something else now.

“We need to watch Dr. No,” Steve interjects, not even because he really wants to, but because they’re in the groove, and they can’t stop. Besides, he tried to make this point earlier, so he can’t back down either, even if it’s over eight hours of screen time later.

The only easy day was yesterday. Booyah.

“Okay,” Danny decides, but he gets up while he says it. “In that case it’s time for stronger booze, though.”

And there it is: the second thing they’ve agreed on today.

*

Connery is the original Bond, and there’s a certain nostalgia Steve feels for his portrayal. Danny seems to feel the same way, and paired with the increasing alcohol level in their blood and the slight insanity that comes from staring at a screen all day, it makes for a simultaneously very mellow and very intense watching experience. They reach the last two glasses of the bottle of wine Danny found them fast enough that Steve has to wonder if there wasn’t a hole in the bottom. On the other hand, when Danny hands him his glass and their fingers brush, Steve feels like maybe he drank that entire bottle by himself.

“Oh God,” Danny laments suddenly, at the same time, which makes for a sufficient distraction. “There’s a white carpet. We’ve been drinking red wine over a millionaire’s white carpet. This thing is probably designer.”

Steve laughs a little. “You’re just figuring that out now?”

“Excuse me for not looking at the floor enough, Mr. Navy SEAL.”

“I don’t see the connection between-” There should have been a few more words in that sentence, but Danny interrupts him by dropping a pair of bare feet in his lap. Steve tries to shove them away with one hand on an ankle, but they come right back. “Hey.”

“Sorry,” Danny says, unapologetically, “but I can’t be touching that white carpet anymore. I need to not be touching that.”

“So you’re touching me instead?”

Danny sips his wine, entire body safely situated on the black couch. “Any stains I get on you will wash right off.”

Steve doesn’t read anything into that only because he’s pretty sure Danny isn’t writing it intentionally. He sighs and gives up on pushing Danny away, and tries to figure out what’s happening on the screen. It’s probably still Dr. No, or maybe they’ve fallen into From Russia With Love and he didn’t even notice. At this point it could be Johnny English for all he knows, because he’s just seeing disconnected scenes of guys shooting at each other, sipping martinis and being pretty inappropriate around women.

No, that’s definitely still Ursula Andress. And James Bond, which- “Am I the only one who can’t stop seeing Harry Langford?”

Danny bursts out in something awfully close to giggles, which automatically sets Steve off, too. It’s simple physics: they’re touching, so when one of them falls prey to hilarity, the other will too, like dominos.

“You’re not,” Danny assures him, wheezily. “You’re not. He really is a huge wanking stereotype.”

Steve swirls the remains of his wine. He can’t stop smiling, and it’s not a just a feeling this time around, but hard fact. “He saves the world and gets the girl.”

“Doing better than either of us.”

“What’re you talking about? We save the world plenty.”

“Yeah, but those girls?” Danny breathes out hard, right into his glass, so the sound is amplified. “I just lost one for the, I don’t even know, third time? Depends on how you count.” He thrusts his glass in Steve’s direction. “And you’re not even trying, these days.”

“Did Mary talk to you?”

“No. What would she have said? It’s not like I don’t have eyes, Steve.”

That’s true, of course. Danny is a Detective, and a damn good one, and as long as it’s not a white carpet next to a bottle of wine, he notices stuff. Still. “Lots of people have eyes. Doesn’t mean they see me.”

Danny looks faintly impressed. “I don’t know if that’s deep or just stupid.”

“Stupid,” Steve says, with a decisive nod. “Definitely stupid.”

This time, he’s the one who sets Danny off with his giggles.

*

They watch From Russia With Love and finally get the bright idea that maybe if they’re having a Bond marathon, they should be enjoying a martini instead of some plain old very expensive wine. Steve’s not even into martinis that much – olives, not his thing – but bickering over the correct way to make them is pretty fun, and it carries them through the fifth or sixth movie of the day. Sixth. Steve is pretty sure it’s the sixth.

When the credits on that one start to roll, Danny stretches expansively. “I’m getting tired of this couch, buddy. Is it weird if we-” He nods at the bedroom door. “There’s a TV in there. I’m pretty sure it’ll be connected to the Bond drive too.”

Steve clutches the black leather to heave himself up off the couch with a sigh. “No, I think that’s inspired.” 

Danny extends an arm in his direction, hand grabby. “Come, help me up.”

“You’re not that old,” Steve gripes, but if he wanted it to sound like a convincing complaint, he should have held off on gripping Danny’s lower arm and hauling him upright. He moves his hand from Danny’s arm to his back and they make their way to the bedroom, slower and a little more wobbly than Steve would normally allow himself in company. It’s fine – it’s just Danny, and Danny has seen him worse than sluggish and drunk from a day of couch-sitting.

“You’re just saying that because we’re nearly the same age and you’re in some kind of permanent midlife crisis,” Danny is telling him, in the middle of the nice thoughts he was having about Danny.

Steve crawls onto the mattress and stuffs a pillow between his back and the headboard to get comfortable. “Who here drives the car equivalent of a penis extension, huh?”

“You do, actually.” Danny falls down on the bed next to him. He looks kind of smug, but with good reason. He’s got Steve there.

“Well, you bought it,” he says, sulky, before he remembers they’re here to watch another movie and he grabs the remote from the nightstand, pushing the button three times to get the tv to turn on faster. What he actually accomplishes is turning the tv on, off, and then on again. Damn modern technology.

“Admitting you use me as your sugar daddy doesn’t suddenly make it better.”

“You invited me on this trip,” Steve feels compelled to point out.

Danny’s mouth drops open. “Shit. Oh, shit, don’t pervert my innocent act of manly caring, you dick.”

Steve waggles his eyebrows like he wants to give them a workout. “I feel so cared for.” For that, Danny socks him in the bicep, so Steve lets out a noise of protest. “Hey! Take it easy. That’s partner abuse. If I had my badge, I could arrest you.”

“It’s manly retribution for the suggestion that I’m trying to buy sex from you. This is not Pretty Woman and you’re not Julia Roberts. Your biceps are-” Danny makes a gesture that expands, like he’s demonstrating the size of a fish he caught. “-too massive.”

Steve blinks at Danny, but gives up when Danny pays more attention to the explosive opening scene of Goldfinger than to him. A part of him, primal and insatiable, still wants Danny’s attention, so he doesn’t think about it too much and lifts the arm he was pretending to shake out after Danny’s punch. Danny must see him coming, because he ducks his head just a little, working with Steve, like he’s afraid Steve might accidentally hit him in the head before the arm settles around his shoulders.

“You’re a cuddlebug,” Danny complains, while he shifts and sags against Steve’s side until he’s comfortable. His head is almost resting on Steve’s shoulder, his hair close enough that Steve can smell his shampoo and hair products.

There are lines, somewhere out there in the world that surrounds them, so Steve doesn’t turn his nose into Danny’s hair to take a deep sniff. It’s a near thing, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for reading! Your comments on this work mean a lot and I've definitely reread them a few times since the last update, so if you want to drop one here, that's awesome. Take care of yourself in these rollercoaster times! 💖
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
